Friday, 23 February 2018

My article "Preserved for Posterity? Present Bias and the Status of Grindhouse Films in the 'Home Cinema' Era" has been published in Journal of Film and Video, 70:1 doi: 10.5406/jfilmvideo.70.1.0003

Abstract:

Despite the closure of virtually all original grindhouse cinemas, ‘grindhouse’ lives on as a conceptual term. This article contends that the prevailing conceptualization of ‘grindhouse’ is problematized by a widening gap between the original grindhouse context (‘past’) and the DVD/home-viewing context (present). Despite fans’ and filmmakers’ desire to preserve this part of exploitation cinema history, the world of the grindhouse is now little more than a blurry set of tall-tales and faded phenomenal experiences, which are subject to present-bias. The continuing usefulness of grindhouse-qua-concept requires that one should pay heed to the contemporary contexts in which ‘grindhouse’ is evoked.

Friday, 2 February 2018

Horror, Cult and Exploitation Media II: A Research Workshop for PhDs and Early Career Researchers

Friday 4 May 2018, Northumbria University, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK

A collaborative event between the Department of Social Sciences and the Department of Arts

PhD students and Early Career Researchers working in the field(s) of “horror, cult and exploitation” screen media, are invited to submit abstracts about their research to deliver at a workshop at Northumbria University on Friday 4 May 2018. The workshop – which follows on from a highly successful event last year – will take the format of a mini-symposium, and consist of three sessions, each made up of four speakers. Speakers will each deliver a 5-10 minute talk about their research to their peers and to a panel of academic experts from Northumbria’s Film and Television Research Group, providing a short introduction to their current project and identifying several questions for discussion. After each presentation, there will be an opportunity for the academic panel and other workshop participants to feedback to each speaker, and to ask follow-up questions.

The workshop is intended to be a small scale networking opportunity for scholars with shared research interests, and to provide a relatively informal opportunity for those newer to academia to engage in dialogue with more established researchers.
The event will close with a short presentation by James Campbell from Intellect Books, who will give advice about academic publishing (including converting a PhD thesis into a monograph).

The academic panel will comprise:
• Dr Russ Hunter (Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies, co-editor of Italian Horror Cinema)
• Dr Steve Jones (Head of Media, author of Torture Porn: Popular Horror After Saw, co-editor of Zombies and Sexuality)
• Dr James Leggott (Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies, author of Contemporary British Cinema: From Heritage to Horror)
• Dr Sarah Ralph (Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies, co-author of Alien Audiences: Remembering and Evaluating a Classic Movie)
• Dr Jamie Sexton (Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies, co-author of Cult Film: An Introduction, founding series co-editor of Cultographies)
• Dr Johnny Walker (Senior Lecturer in Media, author of Contemporary British Horror Cinema: Industry, Genre and Society and co-editor of the Global Exploitation Cinemas book series)

Applicants are reminded that there are only twelve spaces available. Lunch and light refreshments will be provided throughout the day.

Please submit a 250 word summary of your project and a 50-100 word bio to the organiser, Dr Johnny Walker (johnny.walker@northumbria.ac.uk), by Friday 30 March 2018. Applicants will be notified of the outcome the following week.